Requiem for the Mall

By Tom Chiarella

Nov 27, 2017

Malls were the great social and economic experiment of the second half of the twentieth century. Their death has been greatly exaggerated, but they’re not what they once were. We went to find out what’s going on in there.

Outside the mall, three boys sat on the sidewalk in front of P.F. Chang’s, in the shadow of a giant horse statue, looking at their phones. One of them had his feet up on his skateboard like it was an ottoman. Nearby, a telephone contractor held a clipboard up, blocking the sun, scanning the roofline. A woman drinking a Cool Lime Refresher from a massive plastic Starbucks cup stood in a slender blade of shade created by an eight-foot-high sundial, also looking at her phone. Two parking valets wore identical sunglasses. They stared at the horizon. From the mall doors, two women, fingers dangling Lord & Taylor bags, emerged into the sunlight, looking like an artist’s rendering of the verb to shop.

I asked the boys what they were doing at the mall. “We’re allowed to be here,” one of them said, glancing up at me as if arguing with the sky. The other two did not give me a sniff. “His mom is picking us up,” the first one said. He wore a T-shirt that read TEE SHIRT in iron-on letters. “We’re allowed to sit here if we’re just getting picked up, right?” I told him I didn’t know. He muttered at me. All three of them did. The woman by the sundial sipped her drink and smiled. “Don’t look at me,” she said. “I just work here.” The sundial told me it was right about noon. I went in to the mall.

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MALL FACT: 30% of Americans over 18 have worked at a shopping center at some point in their lives.

Why? Why does anyone go to the mall these days? It’s a valid question. Have they not outlived their use? I went to see what life is left in them. People opine about malls being dead. Maybe they are. But here’s this one, still at 93 percent occupancy and employing thirty-eight hundred people. Nine million visitors a year. So, technically alive. Anyway I hadn’t been in a while, and I wondered what goes on in there. I wondered if they had changed.

The mall in question is Eastview Mall, in Victor, New York, a suburb of Rochester, my hometown. It’s big, as these things go (1.6 million square feet), and old, in depreciation terms—forty-six years since its making (and it’s been expanded several times). It’s populated with the usual suspects of retail life: Macy’s, Sears, JCPenney, Victoria’s Secret, L.L. Bean, Abercrombie & Fitch, Lids, Aeropostale, Banana Republic, the Apple Store, Forever 21, The Walking Company, Nail Studio, Nail Studio 2. It has a large detached theater complex and a food court that’s jaunty when it’s full and semi-tragic when devoid of customers. Banners of new food offerings—garlic knots, lobster mac n’ cheese—hang like wanted posters in Carson City. There’s a carousel, improbably manned by a living ticket taker, doling tickets to ride for one dollar. And there are restaurants of unusual size: Chang’s, Champps, Biaggi’s, Bonefish Grill.

So, not the mall. Not the best mall. Not the first. Or the biggest. Just a mall.

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I grew up in a mall.

I’ve always liked saying that, because for me it is more than an expression of my aimless youth. Many people—generations, really—might lay claim to growing up in, even to gaining selfhood under, the in-different lighting of an American mall. That’s fair. What I should really say is: I grew up with a mall. My father built a mall. He worked on its design, supervised its construction, and then stayed on to manage it for forty years. Midtown Plaza, America’s first enclosed urban mall, right there in downtown Rochester, designed by Victor Gruen, the man some have since nicknamed the Mall Maker. Gruen, an Austrian transplant, fathered dozens of American malls in the 1950s and ’60s. They were expansive—he loaded their interiors with art and ornament. Clocks, fountains, gardens. He incorporated music in their creation, and included mahogany and redwood in the construction of interior walls. He cared. He fronted the stores inside his malls with window displays he’d perfected while designing storefronts in Depression-era Europe. These were his proving ground. His windows, my dad once told me, made people want to buy.

Gruen’s exterior designs were unremarkable, workmanlike, even ugly. For Victor Gruen the work of malls went on inside them. In his design, malls were a piece of the puzzle that constitutes human community. In his hands, malls were meant to double as gathering spots, meeting points, celebration locations, performance spaces, even demonstration areas. He believed the social function of malls might one day surpass their economic importance.

My dad worked five and a half days a week for four decades in Midtown Plaza, a salient acolyte of Gruen, with whom he worked only a few years. He wanted that place tied into the lives of everyone in the city. We stayed loyal to that city. He and my mother refused to drift to the suburbs because of that link. My brothers and I thought of ourselves as city kids. We sneered at the very idea of ranch houses and cul-de-sacs. We spent our weekends in Midtown, worked our holidays in Midtown, watched jazz shows in the Midtown Tower restaurant, concerts on the floor of the mall, bought our clothes only in Midtown’s anchor department stores—McCurdy’s and Forman’s, avoiding the third local department store in town, Sibley’s, which sat across Main Street from Midtown. Sibley’s. Bah.

My brothers and I painted the cement pillars in Midtown’s garage, changed fluorescent bulbs in its utility tunnels, carried buckets of hot pitch like hod carriers across the roof of Midtown. At night, my family talked about the stores, the tenants, the trends in retail, and later the slow decay of the ailing city around the mall. In 2002, the property was sold to a California developer who bilked my dad out of a year’s pay and let the whole enterprise go to seed. In 2007, the year my oldest son graduated high school, Midtown’s closing was announced. A year later, my father died. I was fifty the year they tore the mall, his mall, down.

Park Place Mall, Tucson, Arizona, 2011.

Susan Meiselas

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Starting at dawn, I came to Eastview every day for four days, all day. If you’ve seen the sunrise at a suburban mall, then you know there is nothing to it. There is no middle ground, no gentle introduction of daylight at a mall. The sun barely rises, and the switch of the day is suddenly flicked. Bam. Get inside. And buy.

The employees arrive in small bursts, aprons thrown over their shoulders, lugging boxes, smoking one final grit, entering through unmarked doors, a key in a scratchy cylinder or a code tapped out on a keypad. Entering the mall, accompanied by no one at all, they look a little grim. Defeated. Except the Apple Store staff, who in every age and gender identification look like happy, hungover sophomores galumphing off to their favorite studio art class. Sitting in the mall parking lot in the early morning, you can expect some scrutiny. Especially at 6:22 a.m. When you get cruised by security, show them your coffee; everybody understands a raised Styrofoam cup in the quisling light of morning. I havecoffee! That gesture speaks. I’m like everyone else, it says. I’m just waiting to get into the mall.

Mall of America, Bloomington, Minnesota, 2003.

Martin Parr

When you pull open the glass doors of a mall, they draw a suck of air from the interior. It always smells of perfume or shoes. Mall air.

Eastview might not be your mall, but it may as well be. There are 170 retail spaces, and those thirty-eight hundred people are employed there in one way or another. It has 1.4 million feet of leasable interior space, which classifies it as a super-regional mall. The Eastview components—the enclosed common space, the shared walkways, benches, fountains, terrazzo, the storefronts, the food court—are surely similar to, if not the same as, your mall. If you haven’t been to a mall in twenty years, many things haven’t changed all that much. Curly fries. Big pretzels. You still get offered samples of teriyaki chicken. Still not bad. At Eastview, there’s still a Spencer’s Gifts, been there since the opening in 1971. In the walkways, young people hold clipboards, looking to sign you up. For something. Anything. They offer gift cards, discounts. Key chains. You still navigate a mall by looking up to see which department store is ahead of you. At the end of one walkway or another, on the apron of any of the department stores in question, you still run into local fashion shows, radio broadcasts, fundraisers for the local travel teams.

Other parts have changed fundamentally. Cellphones drive entire businesses. Candles, too. And tea. Tea is big at the mall. There’s the valet parking.

But the biggest change? The mall is not crowded.

MALL FACT: More than 90% of purchases are still made in physical stores.

Eastview has its quirks. The walkways are uniformly roofed with glass, providing a weirdly straight-down sunlit illumination. You can always see the sky. A little bit of it anyway. In 2013 management installed a fireplace, laid in area rugs, set up a giant hearth outside Von Maur. And throughout the mall, amongst the smartphone-accessory kiosks and the jewelry-repair places, homey stations are set up like small sitting rooms—leather chairs, table lamps, comfy couches. This is the American mall inviting you to treat it like a place to stay, not just to shop. To dwell there.

People come to read in the cozy chairs. Families sit to argue. Old men in golf shirts doze off. On that first morning, I found three women doing sudoku. A club, they said, that met there on Fridays and Saturdays. Natalie started it, they said. She wasn’t there today. Gallstones. They urged me to sit. Nice chair. Apparently, a lot of people in the area get gallstones. They feel there is ample evidence of that, and begin ticking off the gallstone victims they know. Even I knew one of them, the mother of a woman I knew in college. “See?” one of them marveled. “A mall is a small world.”

Sales reps hold impromptu meetings in the chairs, which amplifies the sense that commerce is alive and well in Victor, New York. “This way we don’t have to meet in a bar, where someone always orders carbs, or drink wine,” a mattress wholesaler told me. Later, in the chairs, I eavesdropped on the performance review of a barista, an older guy. “You are mostly upbeat,” he was told. “And upbeat is good, right? Really good. Essential. But it’s too clear to the customers that frozen drinks aren’t your strength. Are they? I think you show that in your face. Use that upbeat energy when you use the blender. Use your face to smile.” The old barista agreed to try. His supervisor was pleased. “And don’t lean against the counter, okay?”

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The principle of most malls was once to keep people moving and looking, to expose them architecturally to constant opportunities to buy. This is not the case anymore. Not at Eastview, anyway. The urgency of movement is missing. The reasoning now seems to be: If people sit, they won’t leave. I saw more than eighty people sitting on the couches by themselves, mostly checking their phones. At least two of these admitted to me they were ordering from Amazon after having priced an item in the mall. A woman named Anne, from nearby Canandaigua, talked to me about shopping online from the mall, after pricing at the mall. She had to, her husband had COPD, a heart ailment. She retires in twenty-three weeks. Even small savings meant a lot to her. “Money is money,” she said.

“It is what it is,” her friend echoed. She would not give me her name, but she lived in Ogden. Not that nearby.

“What does that mean?” Anne said.

The second woman stammered. “It’s like what you said. Money matters. It’s not a crime. It’s not illegal to shop online here, is it?”

“I’m not even using the Wi-Fi,” Anne said, a little desperately.

Ask a stranger about the mall when at the mall, there is an inevitable discomfort regarding the purpose of the place and its rules. Is it a public space, or not? Who decides the rules? Who enforces them? What is shopping anymore, when you can buy what you want anywhere you are? Like the boys with the skateboard, she assumed I was some sort of mall cop. I reassured her.

“I know that I’m supposed to buy things here,” Anne said. “I’ve been coming in here since I was a kid. It’s a mall. I know that’s what they want. Buying.”

“It is what it is,” the other woman said.

Anne pinched an eye at her. “I hate that expression, Barb.” Then she looked at me. “Oh, don’t use her name, right? She doesn’t want you to use her name.”

“I’m just saying there’s more to the world than the mall,” Barb said. “You can’t ignore the rest of the world when you’re at the mall. It doesn’t just disappear because you’re in here. So it’s fair to check prices online.” Anne agreed with that much.

“What are you going to call me?” Barb said, as I stood to leave the comfy chairs.

What would you like? I asked.

“How about Barbara?” Anne said.

Barb sniffed and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “But just plain Barb, I think.”

The Galleria, Houston, Texas, 2016.

Jérôme Sessini

There are people who only walk the mall.

They arrive early, wait in pairs for the doors to open. Some of them begin walking before the doors open, back and forth in front of the doors like sentries. They dress for it in their way. They are not particularly old, or out of shape. But they are uniformly quiet. They wear shoes that don’t cluck against the floor tiles, don’t echo or drag. They roll their feet, heel-toe, heel-toe. Their earbuds stay tucked in their earports. They wear patches of neon, or Buffalo Bills T-shirts. Track suits, shorts, leggings, T-shirts from upstate wineries, from ancient community fundraisers. But the truth is, the world dresses like mall walkers now, not the other way around. So it is difficult to tell who’s who. Why walk the mall? I ask. Why not walk in a park? Or along the Erie Canal? Uniformly, the walkers cite the weather in Rochester, splendid in the summer, punishing in fall, winter, and spring. Others are pragmatic. “No dogs, no dog poop.” Anxious. “The mall is protected,” the leader of one small walking group tells me. “There are cameras and security.” Or existential. “Everything about it is familiar. There’s nothing to look at after awhile, so I move faster.” Or competitive. “Walkers actually come from other malls to walk here. They just walk fast because we do.” Every walker I talked to admitted they don’t shop when they walk. Several said they actually worked hard not to.

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And Victor Gruen wept.

“In a lot of ways, the walkers are the best regulars, mostly because they show up. But they aren’t shoppers,” says a woman behind the fragrance counter at Macy’s. Do people really shop anymore? In the old-fashioned way, of letting your eyes fall on what you might want? “People shop with a purpose now,” she says. “It’s not so much shopping as entertainment.” She has worked at Eastview for twenty-two years. Her station is just inside the entrance. As we talk she takes a long look at the thinly peopled visual line to another anchor store in the distance, Sears.

MALL FACT: 2007 was the first year since the 1950s that not one new mall was built in the U.S.

“I used to think the days I could see through to the Sears sign were really slow. Now the crowds are so thin that I’m surprised when I don’t see it,” she says. She puts the blame on online shopping. “The UPS guy told me he’ll drop nine packages off at a house in the morning, and by afternoon he’s getting called back to return eight of them. That’s how people are shopping now. It’s not social, it doesn’t involve interaction with people,” she says.

Walta Leake, a nineteen-year-old sales associate at the Sprint store, is standing outside the store in his khakis, looking for some interaction. He wants to sell me a new cellphone plan. He just needs five minutes to do it. He’s a part-time student, a mall enthusiast. “When I was a kid, I found all my new stuff at the mall,” he says. He raps his finger against the air in front of him three times. “It was new, new, new.” It’s hard to imagine that in the few years since Leake was a kid things could have changed that much. “Oh yeah. Very, very different,” he says. “The kids do come to the mall now, but they move around. You’ll find them near clothes. Just looking. They may not be buying here, but they are here, you know? But they keep this place alive.”

At the cellphone repair place, the owner, Manpreet Singh, thirty-one, says, “This business is online, but that does not work well for what I do here. Here I have to convince people. I’m not selling a brand. I make two to three thousand transactions a month. That’s all. That’s all me, standing here, explaining, taking phones apart, defining what damage can and cannot be undone. I have to be here. Someone has to sell.” He knows it’s not the same for the stores around him. “Malls in this country, it feels like two to three more years. We stay on a year-to-year contract because of that,” he says. He looks around, sanguine. He says he’ll shift his business model when the time comes. He doesn’t blame the internet: “At the end of the day, people still want a deal.”

At the end of his career, after returning to Europe, Gruen came to despise the malls he’d built in the suburban U.S. I called John Fayko, a retired architect who worked with my father in the field office for construction on Midtown Plaza, and asked about Gruen. “He was a very elegant guy,” Fayko said. “He used a cigarette holder, wore bow ties. He kept his overcoat draped on his shoulders like a cape. He was impressive. Convincing.” And his model for malls? “Great ideas, sure. Great design principles for what a mall might be. In the abstract. But he didn’t anticipate people would go there for reasons other than shopping. Like, no reason at all.” Fayko speaks plaintively, without derision for the cliché of the American mall. “Over time, as malls got better they became a place for people to hang out and spend time instead of money. The people walking the mall, the teenagers hanging out, people killing time—they see the mall as a public space. They feel it’s theirs. But they aren’t buying. They don’t pay the rent.”

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ION Orchard, Singapore.

Ian Berry

At most entrances to Eastview (and there are nineteen) there are no benches, no trash cans, no ashtrays, and no shade. They don’t want you out there. But sometimes you have to see the sky without looking through a glass ceiling. One afternoon I stepped out at 3:40 p.m.

There was a young woman sitting on her butt, right on the cement, about forty yards from the doors. Kethry Bruce, twenty-four, from Rochester. She had an impressive, vaguely purple Mohawk, wore a short skirt, and kept her tattooed arms wrapped around her knees. “I’m not smoking,” she said as I approached. Again: the mall cop thing. (I need a new haircut.) I told her what I was doing. She raised an eyebrow and stared at the distant L.L. Bean. “I moved here from New York City,” she said. “I’d never been in a mall until I got here.” I told her I grew up in a mall. She ignored me. “I hate malls. I like smaller businesses, handmade stuff. You can’t get that here. Not really. And . . . well, look at it.” She nodded at the parking lot, stretching hundreds of yards toward the theater complex, a vast surface of bone-colored asphalt surrounding the entirety. There were about forty cars dappled across it, and a gray-blue summer storm in the distance. “I’ve never bought anything here.”

I asked why she was there at all. “I style hair,” she said. “I like the place I’m working. I like the people. And this is where they are.”

She felt like a stock character: the disaffected punk philosopher on a smoke break. “I think people need a hub,” she said. “I know people come here for that. But, people are sheep, too. They go where they get herded.”

West End City Center, Budapest, Hungary, 2002.

Stuart Franklin

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Spend enough time in a mall and you start to notice the subdermal layer of the place. The cracks in the floor joints. The too-shiny, too-purple tiles from the late ’80s. Dust in the skylights. Chipped grout. Unpolished floors. I walked down every utility hallway, tried to open every access door. No one approached me, no one stopped me. I followed standpipes and examined HVAC panels. I walked with purpose, unlike the shoppers, so that concerned employees might think I belonged there. My only conclusion? Eastview, at least what I could see behind the curtain, is absurdly clean. Like hospital clean.

In the mall itself, many storefronts were covered, framed out and covered in Sheetrock, plywood, or Homasote, painted in the inevitable ceiling white. Signifying vacancy. My dad hated the sight of a boarded store. “Dress it up all you want,” he said to me once. “But it’s still boarded windows. It stinks of decay.” And yet nearly four thousand people working in 170 retail spaces has to indicate a bottom-line economic health. I counted fourteen vacancies. Management later asserted there weren’t that many. “Some of the spaces you’re talking about are already rented. We’re at 93 percent occupancy right now,” Eastview general manager Mike Kauffman told me. “That’s 1 percent above the industry average.” He acknowledged that online shopping takes a toll, but he pointed out that only 8 percent of all retail business is done online. The rest is still brick and mortar. “Eight percent doesn’t seem all that bad,” he says.

It depends on your margin, I point out.

“We simply believe that there’s still time for people to reinvent the retail model, to mesh online and in-person price points,” he says. But he’s murmuring a little, and I can tell he has to state and restate some version of this optimism every day. How long will this last? I ask finally. He thinks for a while and says, “The infrastructure is sound. Customers are still here. I think you’ll still come to this mall in the middle of this century.”

Mall of the Emirates, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2006.

A. Abbas

Earlier that day, I sat at the bar in a mall restaurant called Biaggi’s, alone, save for the bartender, who visited me every so often from her station at another bar, deeper in the guts of the place. I ordered chicken parm and beans and greens, my dad’s favorite soup.

My father and I used to eat every Saturday at the Top of the Plaza, which sat fourteen stories above the Broad Street entrance to Midtown. You could see the whole complex from there. The mall, with its distinct clearstory, the original department stores between which the mall spanned. Once I asked my father at lunch, high above a snowy Rochester: When do you think you’ll retire? He was fifty-one then, and he told me he never thought about it. Then he said, “I guess I think when I’m seventy-six, I’ll still be coming into work here. The mall will be standing, so I guess I think I’ll have someplace to go every day.” It made perfect sense to me then. It was far enough away, yet the end was so much nearer that he never lived to see it. The bartender brought me my soup. My dad’s soup. Then she asked if I was going to watch the eclipse. I looked up at the television, and saw the silhouette of the moon against the sun, broadcast from the west. I’d forgotten.

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I walked outside, to that huge sundial and the statues of Chinese horses. No one was looking up just then. The sun was still too bright for even a glance. When I looked in the mall, through the glass doors, I could see a crowd gathered there, looking up through the glass ceiling. I went into the mall once more.

One person had eclipse glasses. The others were shading their eyes, trying to catch a little bit of it. The guy with the glasses was describing the eclipse to the rest of the crowd. More people pressed in, because they wanted to hear. “It looks like a large animal, and hot steel,” he said. Eventually one very tall woman said, “I can see it!” And a me-too guy said, “I think the glass here cuts down on the sunlight.”

People looked up, and murmured. I couldn’t see anything.

“You’re saying they planned on it when they built the mall?” someone asked.

“I’m saying the mall is a good place to be, right here and right now,” the tall woman said. Nobody argued. People laughed. People crowded in around each other, trying for a look at whatever the mall would allow them to see.

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